what if?

Compared to What?

A fine column on how you should vote. Even if their candidates are far less than the ideal, if you are a fiscal conservative and in favor of small government, vote Republican.

Maybe you were not that excited that 2012 gave you a choice between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. I sympathize — I liked Rick Perry. But how is President Romney vs. President Obama a hard choice? How is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vs. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid a hard choice? How is Speaker of the House John Boehner vs. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi a hard choice?

It isn’t.

The question wasn’t “Mitt Romney — yes or no?” It was: “Mitt Romney — compared with what?”

Compared with this.

The Obama administration has handed conservatives — and, more important, the country — disaster after disaster after disaster. Rather than scaling back the most worrisome aspects of the surveillance state and the so-called War on Terror, President Obama has expanded on them. Taxes are up, spending is up (2013 spending was $250 billion more than 2009, itself not exactly a banner year for fiscal restraint), health insurance is a chaotic mess subject to ad hoc revision every time Democratic political necessities demand it, our allies are dispirited, our enemies emboldened, our religious liberties under attack by the very government entrusted with defending them, our economy anemic, with too many of our people unemployed and those who are employed earning too little.

I am not naïve enough to believe that having elected Mitt Romney president or consigning the Democrats to the minority in both houses of Congress would change all that. But unless you are ready to give up on electoral politics entirely — and I confess to wavering on that question with a bias toward despair — then it is a matter of deciding whether X is preferable to Y. And sometimes that is a pretty easy call.

Turning the Other Cheek

Reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church has died. While there may be a few who mourn his death, I imagine millions of others are at least shedding no tears that a many filled with so much hate and who committed hateful actions can no longer spread his venom on this earth.

How should we react to this news?  Wesley Pruden shares thoughts that are wise and respectful - adjectives that applied to the Reverend little, if at all, throughout his life.

The social media exploded on the Internet with suggestions of how the death of Mr. Phelps should be marked by those he tormented in his long life. Several members of gay advocacy groups suggested that he “get a taste of his own medicine,” and urged that protests be organized for his funeral. One twitterbird tweeted the proposal that vulgarity be answered with bad taste: “Let’s protest the Westboro Baptist Church’s funeral by holding a graveside gay wedding and rave.” Another said the graveside message should be “God loves gays.”

But others said no, leave the family and their organization alone in their grief. “If the reports of Fred Phelps‘ declining health are accurate,” said Sandra Meade, director of Equality Kansas, as Mr. Phelps lay dying, “then his family and friends are certainly saying their goodbyes and preparing to mourn his loss. We ask that everyone understand the solemnity of the occasion, and honor the right of his family and friends to remember and mourn in private without interruption or unseemly celebration.”

George Takei, an actor and advocate, agreed: “I take no solace or joy in this man’s passing. We will not dance on his grave, nor stand vigil at his funeral holding ‘God hates Freds’ signs, tempting as it may be. He was a tormented soul, who tormented so many. Hate never wins out in the end. It instead always goes to its lonely, dusty end.”

The rich irony here is that some of the gays Mr. Phelps mocked and despised obeyed the Christian commandment to turn the other cheek in answer to insult, offense and torment. Faith teaches us all that it’s the sin, not the sinner, that God hates.

And They Call This "Journalism"!

I do believe that the Washington Post is the best national daily paper today.  So - if they are doing this, journalism is in a sad state of affairs.

So the fundamental point of the Post story, which relied uncritically on a goofball far-left report, is dead wrong. Moreover, the Post story itself acknowledges that the tar sands encompass 35 million acres, so Koch’s 1.1 million comprise less than 3% of the total. The whole point of this exercise is to make the Keystone Pipeline all about Koch, and that premise is implausible from the start.

But there is much more. The Post more or less endorses IFG’s theory that the Keystone pipeline somehow would benefit Koch, even though the Post notes that there is zero evidence to that effect.

And...

Why would the Washington Post embarrass itself by republishing a thoroughly discredited attempt to link the Koch brothers to the Keystone Pipeline? Because that is a Democratic Party talking point, and the Post is a Democratic Party newspaper. But the truth is a little worse than that.

Who is Post reporter Juliet Eilperin? Among other things, she is married to Andrew Light, who writes on climate policy for the Center for American Progress. The Center for American Progress is an Obama administration front group headed by John Podesta, who is a “special advisor” to the Obama administration. CAP’s web site, Think Progress, has carried out a years-long vendetta against the Koch brothers that has focused largely on the environment. Ms. Eilperin’s conflict in writing about environmental issues has already been a subject of controversy at the Post. The paper’s ombudsman should examine this latest example of Ms. Eilperin throwing facts to the winds in her eagerness to promote her (and her husband’s) far-left agenda.

I might add that I have very good friends who are honest and earnest journalists.  It saddens me to see a valuable and critical part of our world being weakened like this.

 

Money Money Money Money

For many liberals, money is the cure for all ills.  And, to be sure, enough cash is often at least a necessary ingredient to have everything working as well as possible.

Nevertheless, if you think that it is always the most critical feature - or a cure all - then you would be sadly mistaken.  My friend, Realtor Christopher Fountain of Greenwich, tells all.

Connecticut spending per pupil is up, in constant dollars, 170% since 1972 while SAT scores have declined.

Ye Olde Double Standards

Won't the American people finally say "Enough!" about this sort of hypocrisy and double standards?

What notorious racist said the following? “Fewer young black and Latino men participate in the labor force compared to young white men. And all of this translates into higher unemployment rates and poverty rates as adults.”

“In troubled neighborhoods all across this country—many of them heavily African American—too few of our citizens have role models to guide them.”

“We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households…. We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.”

“We know young black men are twice as likely as young white men to be ‘disconnected’—not in school, not working.”

As you might guess, Paul Ryan said none of these things. Barack Obama did—in heartfelt speeches at a Chicago church in 2008, at Morehouse College in 2013 and at the White House a few weeks ago.

In his instantly notorious interview with radio talk show host Bill Bennett, Ryan discussed fatherlessness and the importance of role models to passing along an example of hard work. “We have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities, in particular,” he said, “of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.”

For this offense, Ryan was awarded an honorary white hood by the liberal commentariat. But the broad sentiments are indistinguishable from those of Obama in the statements quoted above—all emphasizing a breakdown of work and the consequences of fatherlessness and social isolation—except Obama’s comments were more explicitly racial.

When Barack Obama says such things, which are undeniably correct, he is a brave truth-teller; when Paul Ryan says them, he is making an odious play for racist votes.

Many of the denunciations of Ryan have simply reflected the left’s well-developed reflex for wanton accusations of racism. But Ryan is so obviously not a bigot that liberal pundits have had to deploy a slightly different argument—that the structural racism of the Republican Party is so deep and pervasive that even a possibly well-meaning politician like Ryan can’t escape its gravitational pull.

Brian Beutler of Salon thinks if Ryan’s comment was intended innocently it is even more damning because “it suggests he, and most likely many other conservatives, has fully internalized a framing of social politics that was deliberately crafted to appeal to white racists.”

Writing in Politico Magazine, Ian Haney Lopez of U.C. Berkeley says, “Suppose we stipulate that Ryan is no bigot. So what? The question is not one of animus on Ryan’s part, but of whether—as a tactical matter—he sought to garner support by indirectly stimulating racial passions.”

Paul Krugman is also in the lack-of-bigotry-is-no-defense camp: “Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time.”

To Support Its Policies?

Did the Obama administration allow a cover up of a GM faulty part that led to many deaths?

Read for yourself.

In the wake of a scathing New York Times investigation published this past weekend, all hell is breaking loose over the General Motors recall of more than 1.6 million cars with faulty ignitions. We covered the scope of the mechanical failure earlier, a failure that can lead to your car turning off while you're driving it, and what to do if your vehicle falls under the recall. But the fallout is just beginning. The Times piece says that 260 incidents of ignition failures were reported to GM and to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). Now both that federal agency and the carmaker are coming under heavy fire. 

Yes, this is the same GM that the administration perhaps saved from extinction. If the allegations are true, but one more example of how government should not be the one to judge which companies should live and which should die. The market should handle such decisions.

No Other Recourse

What do lefties do when they cannot win an argument on the facts or reasoning?  They resort to their favorite sort of name calling:  RACIST!

Here they go - again - to attack Paul Ryan without substance.

From Andrew Sullivan, he quotes another liberal, Michael Sean Winters, who has the decency to give Ryan the benefit of the doubt (after other false smears):

First, we on the left have been complaining that Republicans like don’t give a hoot about the poor, and not without cause. I remember Cong. Ryan speaking at Georgetown in 2012 and talking about subsidiarity and federalism and how the federal government should not be the lead actor in anti-poverty efforts. I thought at the time: That would be credible if he could point to any single Republican governor or mayor who was actually attempting some innovative anti-poverty efforts, but he can’t, so the invocation of subsidiarity in this regard is a smokescreen. It is obvious that Ryan has been trying to wrestle with the issue of poverty since then, and I think we have an obligation not to throw his words back in his teeth the second they are uttered. That is not the way to create a bipartisan consensus on the need for our nation to confront lingering poverty in our midst.

Kudos to Sullivan, Winters, and any others who are honest - even when they perhaps disagree with theory. Would that more in politics could do the same.

Conservative Without Knowing It

David Mamet - a playwright who weaves philosophy and deep thought with fast paced messages, frequently laced with foul language. An interview that will gladden you; at least someone in the arts is still keeping America awake and vibrant.

One of Mamet’s recent plays, Race, is about a controversial trial full of racial implications. He wrote it to tackle America’s “hypocrisy” on the most intractable of social issues.  

“In the African American community, one of the legacies of slavery that Thomas Sowell writes so beautifully about is that the generations that endured slavery were the toughest people in the world,” Mamet explains. “The legacy is not that they emerged as slaves, but that they transcended it, and didn’t want to go back. Then Lyndon Johnson comes along and says, ‘I can help you.’ Well, he helped them right back, but that’s human nature.” 

The great jazz critic and essayist Stanley Crouch makes the compelling point that the invention of modern music, and the establishment of the blues aesthetic, by illiterate slaves in cotton fields might very well be the “greatest achievement in the history of the species,” but all America hears and sees every February, during black history month, are the slave narratives and pictures of fire hoses. 

Mamet pointed out that one of the most tired, and tiresome, tropes of American politics is the piety that “we must have a dialogue on race.” “We’ve been having one continuous dialogue on race for my entire lifetime, and it only worsens and widens the divide,” he said before explaining that American liberalism infantilizes black Americans in a culture of dependency. “Black people”, Mamet pointed out, “are sufficiently smart and strong not to need the paternalism of good willed white liberals to make it.”

 

 

 

 

Purity? Or Success?

Many conservatives I know aim at the politicians they believe are most pure. They promote their ideals to the nth degree, never waivering from commitment to principle and theory.

Over and over, however, I have always wondered this. In the world of politics, purity may sound pretty - but it doesn't put the sort of laws on the table that you want. If your ideal politician cannot win elections - and instead puts people into office who are not 15% removed from what you'd like, but instead 83% - can that possibly be good?

Noemie Emery well explains.

Goldwater lost in one of the great drubbings in history, lost by more than any Republican but Alfred M. Landon, and carried only his home state and five southern states for all the wrong reasons (opposing -- for a fairly innocent reason -- the Civil Rights Act of 1964.)

No one followed the Cruz playbook more than Goldwater, and no one has managed to lose so conclusively. He offered a choice, not an echo, and nobody took it. But how, if Cruz is so right, could this have happened? It can’t, which is why it is never brought up in this context. In his world, it doesn’t exist.

As the Goldwater debacle has been excised from history, so have the actual reasons why Dole, McCain and Romney all lost. Dole lost because the Bill Clinton he faced in 1996 was not the Clinton of 1993-94, but the Third Way Bill Clinton, who with the help of Dick Morris was triangulating his way between Newt Gingrich and congressional Democrats -- the Bill Clinton who would sign the welfare reform bill and say the era of big government was over and gone.

As for "President" Romney, exit polls showed he carried the electorate on critical measures like values and leadership, and lost because he failed badly on one single measure: "cares about people like you."

This suggests that he lost not because he needed to be more like Cruz, who gives not a clue that he cares about anyone, but more like compassionate conservative George W. Bush, who did very well with the Hispanics and the lower-middle-class white voters whom Romney so drastically lost.

The Definition of Insanity?

This.

This is perhaps, the final proof that modern liberalism is all about hating people, not helping people. Like so many instances of left-wing lunacy, it involves the Koch brothers.

Specifically, David Koch, who gave New York-Presbyterian Hospital $100 million toward construction of a new outpatient facility. This is how the hospital described Koch’s gift:

Hospital trustee and longtime supporter David H. Koch has made the lead gift of $100 million to support the new center, which will be called the David H. Koch Center. The transformative gift is the largest philanthropic donation in the hospital’s history….

The David H. Koch Center is designed to provide patients with the best personalized and integrated outpatient care, from diagnosis to treatment to aftercare, in a single, patient-friendly and technologically sophisticated environment. The 450,000-square-foot facility will open in 2018. The center will house a range of services, including multidisciplinary care for digestive diseases, cancer and other conditions, as well as preadmission testing for all hospital patients, outpatient surgery, interventional radiology, diagnostic imaging and a wellness center.

A sane person who has found himself on the opposite side of one political issue or another from David Koch would respond to that news by concluding that Koch is a pretty nice guy who is doing some good things in the world, whether I agree with him on various political issues or not. But that isn’t how today’s liberals think. No: instead, New York’s liberals are protesting against David Koch’s $100 million gift.

That’s mostly the usual anti-Koch BS, but the lead item is curious: “Koch funds…the war on women’s reproductive rights.” Actually, the Koch brothers have never taken a position on abortion. To the extent that the libertarian organizations they support have weighed in on the issue, most of them are likely pro-abortion. Also, Mrs. Flynn Walker is herself a lesbian activist whose gay wedding was celebrated in the New York Times. Does she know that David Koch is a supporter of gay marriage? Perhaps not.

David Koch is a cancer survivor who has given hundreds of millions of dollars to cancer research and to improve the treatment of cancer and other diseases, out of love and concern for his fellow man. Liberals try to block improved health care because they are consumed by rage and hate. This episode tells you, really, all you need to know about modern liberalism.

Good to Have Friends

Hey; ain't their money!  Nope; it's yours.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau officials will pay $22.3 million to lease temporary offices in addition to the record-breaking $145 millionbeing spent to renovate the agency's headquarters, according to documents obtained by the Washington Examiner.

The temporary offices to be occupied by CFPB for the next two years are being leased in a building owned by Neil G. Bluhm, a longtime friend and campaign bundler for President Obama.

Bluhm made headlines in 2010 when he hosted Obama's 49th birthday party at his Chicago home. Admission was $30,000 per person, with the proceeds going to the Democratic National Committee.

Strong Words

But true ones from the very liberal Guardian.

Why won’t America ever see a government program that teaches whitemen how to live responsibly? Because society expects whites to take responsibility for their lives. Even the progressive black politics of a progressive black president seem to hold whites to a standard of excellence – and blacks to an all too familiar standard of inferiority. That kind of underlying assumption, Steele writes, inevitably leads blacks toward feeling “entitled to irresponsibility”.

“We all have a job to do,” Obama said on Thursday. “And we can do it together – black and white, urban rural, Democrat and Republican.” He should have told black Americans – directly – what Steele prescribes: that they “must be agents of their own fate”.

It’s not everyone else’s problem to ensure black and Hispanic kids go to school, stay out of trouble and finish high school. That’s the job of parents. And if Obama was really serious about fixing the troubles facing black men, from childhood all the way through to a crime crisis later in life, he would advance policies that reward responsible behavior, not more out-of-wedlock births.

“The worst part,” Obama said before those families of victims and business leaders and philanthropists, “is we’ve become numb to these statistics” because “we take them as the norm”. Well, they’ve been the norm for going on a half-century, and it’s about time the one man most compelled to lead compels blacks to act for themselves, to be keepers of our own individual destinies.

Keeping America Safe - Case #4,282

Did you ever see a kid with a finger that looked remarkably like a firearm?

Nah; me neither.  But in this school.....

To cleanse the palate, via Legal Insurrection. Lest you think the punishment was unwarranted, the school district wants you to know that the kid was pointing his finger, and I quote, “kind of execution style.”

You ask me why I’m an atheist. I ask you in response: Would a just God allow people like this to run our schools?

“She said if it happened again the suspension would be longer, if not permanent,” said Entingh, who also received a letter explaining the reason for Nathan’s suspension as a “level 2 look alike firearm.”…

Ohio’s “zero-tolerance” rules in public schools came under attack in January when state Sen. Charleta Tavares introduced bill SB 167 to reverse or reform the original 1998 law introduced as part of SB 55. The 1998 bill mandated schools “adopt a policy of zero tolerance for violent, disruptive, or inappropriate behavior, including excessive truancy.”…

According to state disciplinary figures for the 2012-2013 school year, a total of 419 statewide students, from various grade levels, were suspended because of an incident in the category of “firearm look-a-likes,” and an additional 38 students were expelled.

In the Columbus City Schools District, where Nathan goes to school, 12 students were expelled because of incidents in the “firearm look-a-likes” category, while 69 students were suspended. Contrast that with categories such as harassment and intimidation, in which zero students were expelled, though 1527 were suspended district-wide.

The obvious compromise here: Allow finger handguns but ban assault fingers.

Incentives Work

And is this an incentive we truly want in place?  One where threats of violence shut down the free speech rights of others?  I think not.

David Agema (a Michigan state representative) and some other people organized a Jan. 26, 2012 event that included as a speaker Kamal Saleem. Saleem runs Koome Ministries, which aims to teach about what it sees as “radical Islam’s true agenda.” Plaintiffs say Saleem “has a unique perspective on the internal threat to America posed by Sharia law and radical Muslims as he was once a Muslim involved in terrorist activities who has since transformed himself and converted to Christianity.”

To hold this event, plaintiffs rented a room at Alleghan High School for $90. They also asked the local police department to provide two officers as security. Then,

Shortly before the event was to take place, a woman approached the police officers at Allegan High School and “stated that Kamal Saleem had a $25 million dollar bounty on his head.” An Allegan police officer talked with Jones, Saleem’s bodyguard, who did not deny that a bounty existed. “Jones further stated that there had been death threats directed toward Kamal Saleem from Islamic extremists in the past.”

While the event was still in progress, Chief Hoyer ordered Plaintiffs to shut down the event. Other events were occurring simultaneously in other locations within the Allegan High School building while Saleem was speaking.

Consider what incentives this sort of decision creates. If you don’t like a speaker, make death threats against him. Then, if you can somehow let American government officials know about those threats, the officials will kick the speaker out of the places that it rented to him for his speech. (Nor is the principle in the case limited to high school buildings — school wasn’t in session, and the government could raise a similar security objection for any government building where other people are present, or perhaps even a building whether this is the only event taking place.)

 

Go Figure

I can't.

My opinion of this is not printable in genteel society.

An airline that gets US taxpayer dollars for security has wiped Israel from its flight map.

The US Department of Homeland Security spends $425,000 annually on a preclearance customs facility for Etihad Airways, a partner of American Airlines, at Abu Dhabi International Airport.

The facility fast-tracks Abu Dhabi travelers to the United States by allowing them to clear customs more easily and bypass long lines.

But the carrier, owned by the United Arab Emirates, has an official travel-route map that shows all surrounding countries, including Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Cyprus — but not the Jewish state or its major cities.

Etihad also has refused to transport any Israelis, who aren’t allowed in the UAE. In 2010, it even began teaching its flight agents how to identify Israeli travelers by their “accents and traits,” the BBC has reported.

Etihad is the sole airline that provides service between Abu Dhabi and US cities, including New York, Chicago and Washington.

Basic Economics

 

 

Many liberals we know get behind the "rah rah rah" for a higher minimum wage.  Sounds good, right? Everyone should enjoy a "living wage" (whatever that means) - and of course it appears more appealing to have people with modest incomes have more dough in their pockets.

But "sounding good" cannot replace reality. Economist Don Boudreaux explains the folly in such thinking.

Pres. Obama insists that raising the hourly U.S. national minimum wage by 39.3 percent – from its current $7.25 to $10.10 by July 2016 – will have (as described by two members of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, Jason Furman and Betsey Stevenson) “little or no negative effect on employment.”  Furman and Stevenson and the Administration dispute the Congressional Budget Office’s findings that this proposed hike in the minimum wage will put hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers out of jobs.  So here’s a challenge that I (and others) have posed before but believe to be sufficiently penetrating to pose again.  This challenge, of course, is posed to supporters of this hike in the minimum wage: Name some other goods or services for which a government-mandated price hike of 39.3 percent will not cause fewer units of those goods and services to be purchased.  Indeed, name even just one such good or service.

Beer?  Broccoli?  Bulldozers?  Coffee?  Haircuts?  Natural gas?  Automobiles?  Housing?  Preventive health-care?  Lawn-care service?  Tickets to the movies?  Smart phones?  Subscriptions to the New York Times?  Books by Paul Krugman?  Professors of sociology?  Assistant professors of economics?  Any of these products work for you?  If none of these work, surely you can name at least one other for which a 25-percent price hike will not cause fewer units of that product to be purchased.  Or does low-skilled labor just happen to be the one good or service in the entire world for which a government-mandated 25-percent rise in the price that its buyers must pay for it will not diminish buyers’ willingness to buy it?